Archive for March, 2011

Spike Lee has reminded us of his longtime, and all too predictable, belief that Cleopatra was black on the occasion of Liz Taylor’s funeral. This instantly brought to mind Zora Neale Hurston’s pithy retort to similar claims by W.E.B. DuBois: “I resent his putting that Greek slut, Cleopatra, into the same race as me.”

Friedrich Hayek, the Nobel-prize-winning Austrian economist (and now YouTube sensation), upheld economic competition and opposed government policies that reduced it. In his surprise bestseller, The Road to Serfdom, he argued that central planning would undermine competition, hamper the economy, and lead to pressures for more and more measures that would enhance the power of...Read More »

Start one. The day before Obama bombed Libya, 3/4 of Americans opposed U.S. intervention. Today, 60% of Americans favor it. A whopping shift of about 35%—meaning more than a third of Americans changed their minds about U.S. intervention, once the bombs began falling. Surreal.

Operation Odyssey Dawn—the bizarrely named military attack upon Libya—is a relatively small war. It is only because of this that Obama partisans are getting away with not calling it a war at all. It is indeed tiny compared to the operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. It pales in comparison to the great U.S. wars...Read More »

In 1943, a team of chemists at Harvard University led by Louis Fieser produced napalm, and thereby beat out competing teams at DuPont and Standard Oil in a government competition for its development. Like many scientists who have worked on weapons development for the government, Fieser was unapologetic, even when the U.S. military’s use of...Read More »

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Americans were gripped by hysteria, unsure of where and when the next attack might come. Nothing contributed to this climate of fear as did the anthrax attacks that began exactly one week after the Twin Towers fell. Five were killed, seventeen others were infected, and letters containing the...Read More »

“The president does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.” —Senator Barack Obama, December 20, 2007 On March 19, 2011, the exact anniversary day of the beginning of the war in Iraq, Barack...Read More »

In the next years, if you find someone online defending the warfare state, it just might be a government propagandist. The web persona might be a complete fake, even the product of a computer program concocted by the US military “to influence internet conversations and spread pro-American propaganda,” reports the Guardian. It has become...Read More »

[Cross-posted in the March 22 issue of The Lighthouse, the Independent Institute’s weekly email newsletter. Sign up for your free subscription here.] We are delighted to announce the publication of the Spring 2011 issue of the Independent Institute’s peer-reviewed journal, The Independent Review, edited by Senior Fellow Robert Higgs. This issue’s articles and book...Read More »

MyGovCost.org Director and Independent Research Fellow Emily Skarbek was a guest on the Heartland Institute’s Budget & Tax News podcast. Click to listen to her commentary on the roots of our current spending crisis, what’s at stake in the Congressional budget war, and how to use the Institute’s very timely and user-friendly Government Cost...Read More »

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